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Uhh... #cows was suggested for tag 2.
I've been reading a book on Eastern philosophy. So many good quotes. —on the Upanishads, ancient Indian writings —on Charvaka —on Vasubandhu —Rabi'ah, a Muslim Sufi —on Al-Ghazali —Rumi, a Muslim Sufi. Centuries before the theory of evolution, one might add. He also said "I am not...even a Muslim as the term is generally understood." Like many Sufis, he flirted with heresy. —RumiI am not the body, because the body is impermanent and subject to growth and decay; I am not the mind and its thoughts and feelings and dreams, because they too change and pass away; I am not the consciousness in deep sleep, because although there the perception is freed from duality and division, it comes to an end on waking; what I am is the witness of all that persists through all these states
When people begin to reflect with freedom from presuppositions and religious superstition they tend to the materialist belief, though deeper reflection takes them away from it
Shankara, points out that when we wake up from a dream we know that it is illusory because we experience the greater reality of the physical waking world. The question that faces Vasubandhu is this: if we wake up from the ordinary world, what is the greater reality that allows us to see that previously we had only dreamt?
O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, And if I worship You in hope of Paradise, Exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, Grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty
love…allows for a direct cognition of God by the soul.
For several epochs I was flying about in space like atoms of dust without a will, after which I entered the inorganic realm of matter. Crossing over to the vegetable kingdom I lost all memory of my struggle on the material plane. From there I stepped into the animal kingdom, forgetting all my life as a plant, feeling only an instinctive and unconscious urge towards the growth of plants and flowers…rising in the scale of animality I became a man pulled up by the creative urge of the Creator whom one knows. I continued advancing from realm to realm developing my reason and strengthening the organism. There was ground for ever getting above the previous types of reason. Even my present rationality is not a culmination of mental evolution. This, too, has to be transcended, because it is still contaminated with self-seeking, egoistic biological urges. A thousand other types of reason and consciousness shall emerge during the further course of my ascent; a wonder of wonders!
Life is not an illusion, but an affirmation of physical reality. The illusion is death.
I don't know much about Rumi, but the few times I've heard of him I'm struck by his profundity. -- Rumi"I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside."
After the great 1994 Northridge earthquake in LA a snide critic said to architect Frank Gehry "Now all of the buildings look like your designs", to which Gehry replied "I am glad God now sees it my way." "Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me." - James Dean #cows #architecture
(On writing a book about conspiracy theories.) The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless. Alan MooreThe main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable as the statues in public parks and just about that dull. This is very annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked "Best-Sellers of Yesteryear," and nobody goes near them but an occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly and hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like The Triple Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue. They do not like it that "really important books" get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the news-stands of the country, and is obviously not there just to say goodbye. To tell you the truth, I do not like it very much myself. In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read too. Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never goes out of style. The hero’s tie may be a little off the mode and the good gray inspector may arrive in a dogcart instead of a streamlined sedan with siren screaming, but what he does when he gets there is the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window. It just keeps getting better.The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
"But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instict to help each other out. It may not seem that way sometimes, but it's true." From Andy Weir's The Martian
I love that quote but hate the word 'instinct.' I had a history professor who at times seemed to teach in a manner similar to that of Colonel DuBois from Starship Troopers. He had a personal vendetta against the misuse of the word 'instinct' as applied to humans. By definition, an instinct is 'an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.' He offered $100 cash prize to anyone who could find a human behavior that met those criteria. Lots of people tried the first day, fewer people the second, and by the end of the third week the class had pretty much conceded that humans have no instincts. We have reflexes, we have conditioned behavioral patterns, but nothing complex that doesn't have to be taught.
The key word there is innate. Behavioral responses to stimuli in humans has to be taught, without exception. That is, for anything that actually goes to the brain. Your hand pulls away from a hot stove before your brain realizes it is registering pain. Reflex, not instinct.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, NatureOur age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Normally we are asked to quote something from our recent reading. I recently read an email from a friend of mine in Brazil. This was the quote in his signature with both the original Portuguese and an English translation: "Ninguém caminha sem aprender a caminhar, sem aprender a fazer o caminho caminhando, refazendo e retocando o sonho pelo qual se colocou a caminhar." "No one treads without learning to tread - without learning how to tread by treading, without learning to remake, to retouch, the dream for whose cause the treaders have set off down the road." - Paulo Freire
From a Dutch article.The market has not proven to be less bureaucratic and oppressive than the state (or rather: behind the invisible hand of the market one too often finds the fist of the state). Both sides assume an inherently distrusting image of mankind. The Right wing suspects that people are profoundly selfish and lazy; the Left does not trust people to make their own choices.